Rare Books 5: Big-L Literature

Literature with an L absorbs my attention in rare book cataloguing here at home, online. A translation by one of France’s greatest tragedians, Pierre Corneille (born 1606) of ‘The Imitation of Christ’ into rhyming verse (Brussels, in the year of the translator’s death, 1684).  Notes: One of the most read books of Western literature, ‘The Imitation of Christ’ is the product of a religious movement in late medieval Germany and the Netherlands known as the Devotio Moderna. Perhaps Corneille turned it into verse for public recitation, and because it came naturally. It’s hard to say why, but it doesn’t matter: the book sold. Although Thomas à Kempis is generally believed to be the author, dispute persists, hence many catalogue descriptions of this work grudgingly give him an added entry, just not to confuse anyone. Translations “by several hands” of Ovid’s  Heroides, i.e. the Heroines, but called here simply Epistles (London, 1680). Notes: Most of these rare books require original cataloguing, that is to say I describe them from the ground up. Sometimes, by good fortune, an online record is found and downloaded as occurred here, the record containing information that would otherwise be missed. It is nowhere stated, for example, unless you start reading the book, that the poet John Dryden wrote the Preface. He needs his own entry. He translated three of the epistles, including ‘Dido to Aeneas’. He collaborated with other poets, who need to be listed. I’m especially excited to find a flowing version of one of Ovid’s Epistles translated by Aphra Behn. Here is Virginia Woolf in ‘A Room of One’s Own’: “All women together ought to let flowers fall upon the tomb of Aphra Behn which is, most scandalously but rather appropriately, in Westminster Abbey, for it was she who earned them the right to speak their minds." Cicero’s Orations, edited and with copious footnotes in Latin (!) by the Jesuit Charles Merouville (1625-1705), both for edification and as models for sermon writers (London, 1784). Notes: When the publisher does not spell the editor’s name correctly, the cataloguer shows patience, fortitude, and cunning as he scours the best sources to confirm the right spelling. In Merouville’s case, this is the Library of Congress Name Headings. Generations of readers on both sides of La Manche used this work throughout the 18^th century, our own copy being this publisher’s Editio Undecima.